The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A computing device may include various removable and non-removable storage devices that store data. The storage devices may include both volatile and non-volatile storage devices including, but not limited to, a hard disk drive (HDD), an optical storage drive, random access memory (RAM), read only memory (ROM), and removable memory. For example, the removable memory may include flash memory.
The flash memory may include a flash drive that is used to emulate an HDD. For example, the computing device may store data to the flash memory as if the flash memory is an HDD. The flash drive may store metadata that indicates how user data is stored to the flash drive. For example, the metadata may indicate how logical addresses correspond to actual physical addresses of the flash drive that contain the user data.
During operation of the computing device, the metadata is updated and stored in volatile memory when user data is read from and written to the flash drive. The metadata is transferred to the flash drive when the computing device is powered down.